It is true – the day after was pretty smooth and my pain was minimal.  I even went to work and served a full day without complaint or incident (well, some complaint over the fact that I was stuck eating soup while my colleagues enjoyed free tacos).  But Thursday seemed to bring more pain than I could have expected and today was not much better.  The sensation of having two full-sized teeth pulled from my jaw was (and still is) much more palpable than that first day after had prepared me to experience.

I’m doing my best to plow through it.  I’m taking ibuprofen horse pills as often as my prescription allows, cycling through antibiotics, ice packs and salt water rinses as needed and occasionally drinking and eating what I can manage (I surprised myself today by eating a whole cheesesteak … minus the bun … and without actually chewing any of it).  I have stronger pain pills I can also take and do when I go to bed, but given my work schedule this week, bed is not someplace I’ve spent nearly enough time lately.

Hopefully the weekend will bring more relief.  Hopefully by Monday I will be feeling enough better that I don’t feel like going home halfway through the day (at least not due to my teeth).  Hopefully sometime in my near future I will be able to eat something besides yogurt and applesauce (I’m surprisingly not as hungry as I feel I should be, but I miss chewing my food).  Only time will tell.  I’m just glad I shouldn’t need to go through this again … hopefully.

At the age of 33, on the morn of St. Patrick’s Day, I found myself sitting under the harsh lights waiting to go under the drill – I had my wisdom teeth removed.  It was well overdue and needed to be done, but knowing that did not prevent my stomach from protesting as I approached the office door.  Intellect won the day because – as some wise man once said, my guts have shit for brains.  All told, it wasn’t a bad process and a half a day later I don’t feel all that bad.

As many who know me well are aware (and the rest shall now be aware), I’m not a big fan of dentistry.  I understand the necessity of it, I just don’t enjoy the actual experience.  As a result, I am an infrequent and reluctant patron.  I think in the years since I’d graduated high school and was thus self-responsible (I’ll get this word popular – you just wait), I’ve been into a dentist’s office as a patient all of about 5 or 6 times.  About half of those are cleanings while the other half are the subsequent visits for fillings found during the cleanings.  Oddly, the fillings don’t bother me that much – it is the cleanings that I can’t stand.  It is the tastes of the pastes and the fluoride and the feeling of all those sharp metal instruments to clean off the build-up that just annoy me to no end.  The irony of it is that my younger sister is a dental hygienist (technically the timing of getting my wisdom teeth out is her fault).

But I know that I need to take care of myself – including my teeth.  And it seems that my bottom wisdom teeth (which seemingly didn’t exist when I was 17) were not doing me any favors.  They were breaking through the gums at an angle such that they were essentially plowing the remainder of my teeth forward.  I’m actually hoping that their remove may cause my bottom teeth to become less crowded.

So I got it taken care of – I went to an oral surgeon (they know what they are doing with these things – no offense to any dentists out there).  He gave me an IV and injected a shot that he said would start to make me feel relaxed, then a moment later he was waking me up and sending me on my way (and had apparently turned the clocks forward an hour when I wasn’t looking).  I was still groggy for hours afterward as well as numb in my jaw.  But at this point I’m feeling pretty good.  There is pain, I won’t deny that.  But so far I’ve only taken ibuprofen for it and it has made it tolerable (though I WILL be taking something stronger when I hit the sack).

I’m not entirely sure why they are called wisdom teeth – do I feel any more or less wise as a result of their removal?  Not particularly (except maybe moreso about the experience of their removal).  Do I regret having them removed?  Not so far.  Though part of me wishes I’d asked to keep the teeth (not sure why).  Oddly my wife and I now both had had half of our wisdom teeth removed and had experiences opposite of what was expected – she had her top set removed and was told that the discomfort should be milder and the swelling should be much less.  That was a week ago and she still looks somewhat chipmunk-ish.  By no means to I consider my wife weak and I’m not one to think myself considerably strong or pain tolerant – this is just an unusually atypical dynamic.  Anyway, I’ll be happy when I can eat solid foods again (applesauce, yogurt, and soup will only get me so far).